Description

The worldwide best seller for serious Web developersnow 100% updated!

In-depth HTML 4/CSS, Java 2, Servlets, JSP, XML, and more!

Industrial-strength code examples throughout!

The authoritative guide to every technology that enterprise Web developers need to master, from HTML 4 to Java 2 Standard Edition 1.3, servlets to JavaServer Pages, and beyond. Core Web Programming, Second Edition brings them all together in the ultimate Web development resource for experienced programmers.

This book's first edition is used in leading computer science programs worldwide, from MIT to Stanford, UC Berkeley to Princeton, UCLA to Johns Hopkins. Now, it's been 100% updated for today's hottest Web development technologieswith powerful new techniques, each with complete working code examples!

Preface

Introduction

In late 1995, Marty Hall proposed a new course for the part-time graduate program in Computer Science at the Johns Hopkins University. The idea was to bring together the major Web-related topics in a single course dubbed "Distributed Development on the World Wide Web," with Java technology as a unifying theme. Students would look at HTML, Java, HTTP, CGI programming, and JavaScript, with lots of hands-on projects and no exams. Little did Marty know what he was getting himself into. By the time the first section was offered in the summer of 1996, the Java tidal wave had swept through the university and the companies that the students represented. Shortly after enrollment opened, the class was filled. There were more students on the waiting list than in the course. Marty got frantic phone calls from students insisting that they absolutely had to be in the course. Several local companies called, asking for on-site courses. What fun!

However, when Marty went shopping for texts over the next semester or two, he got a rude surprise. Despite the availability of good books in most of the individual areas he wanted to cover, Marty found that he needed three, four, or even five separate books to get good coverage of the overall material. Similarly, for his day job, Marty was constantly switching back and forth among the best of the huge stack of books he had accumulated and various on-line references. Surely there was a better way. Shouldn't it be possible to fit 85 percent of what professional programmers use in about 35 percent of the space, and get it all in one book?

That was the genesis of the first edition of Core Web Programming. The book was very popular, but the industry has been rapidly moving since the book's release. Browsers moved from HTML 3.2 to 4.0. The Java 2 platform was released, providing greatly improved performance and graphics libraries suitable for commercial-quality applications. JSP 1.0 came along, resulting in an explosion of interest in both servlets and JSP as an alternative to CGI and to proprietary solutions like ASP and ColdFusion. XML burst upon the scene. The server equalled or even surpassed the desktop as the biggest application area for the Java programming language.

Wow. And demand has only been growing since then. Although readers were clamoring for a new edition of the book, it was just too much for Marty to handle alone. Enter Larry Brown, with broad development and teaching experience in Java and Web technologies, and with particular expertise in the Java Foundation Classes, multithreaded programming, RMI, and XML processing with Java. Larry teamed up with Marty to totally update the existing material to HTML 4, CSS/1, HTTP 1.1, and the Java 2 platform; to replace the CGI sections with chapters on servlets 2.2 and JSP 1.1; and to add completely new sections on Swing, Java 2D, and XML processing with JAXP, DOM Level 2, SAX 2.0, and XSLT. They even got a little bit of sleep along the way.

WeMarty and Larryhope you find the result enjoyable and useful!

Real Code for Real Programmers

This book is aimed at serious software developers. If you are looking for a book that shows you how to use a browser, lists the current hottest Web sites, and pontificates about how Web-enabled applications will revolutionize your business, you've come to the wrong place. If you're already a programmer of some sort and want to get started with HTML, XML, Java applets, desktop applications in Java, servlets, JavaServer Pages, and JavaScript as quickly as possible, this is the book for you. We illustrate the most important approaches and warn you of the most common pitfalls. To do so, we include plenty of working code: over 250 complete Java classes, for instance. We try to give detailed examples of the most important and frequently used features, summarize the lesser-used ones, and refer you to the API (available on-line) for a few of the rarely used ones.

A word of caution, however. Nobody becomes a great developer just by reading. You have to write some real code too. The more, the better. In each chapter, we suggest that you start by making a simple program or a small variation of one of the examples given, then strike off on your own with a more significant project. Skim the sections you don't plan on using right away, then come back when you are ready to try them out.

If you do this, you should quickly develop the confidence to handle the real-world problems that brought you here in the first place. You should be able to balance the demand for the latest features in Web pages with the need for multiplatform support. You should be comfortable with frames, style sheets, and layered HTML. You should be able to make portable stand-alone graphical applications. You should have no qualms about developing Web interfaces to your corporate database through JDBC. You should be able to connect these applications to remote systems over the network. You should understand how to easily distribute computation among multiple threads, or even spin it off to separate systems by using RMI. You should be able to decide where servlets apply well, where JSP is better, and where a combination is best. You should understand HTTP 1.1 well enough to use its capabilities to enhance the effectiveness of your pages. You should be able to spin off complex server-side behaviors into JavaBeans components or custom JSP tag libraries. You should be able to use JavaScript to validate HTML forms or to animate Web pages. You should get a raise. A big one, preferably.

How This Book Is Organized

This book is divided into four parts: HTML, Java programming, server-side programming, and JavaScript.

Part 1: The HyperText Markup Language

Web pages are created with HTML, the HyperText Markup Language. HTML lets you mix regular text with special tags that describe the content, layout, or appearance of the text. These tags are then used by Web browsers like Netscape Navigator or Microsoft Internet Explorer to format the page. This first part of the book covers the following topics in HTML.

HTML 4.01. Full coverage of all the elements in the latest official HTML standard. Hypertext links, fonts, images, tables, client-side image maps, and more.

Part 3: Server-Side Programming

Programs that run on a Web server can generate dynamic content based on client data. Servlets are Java technology's answer to CGI programming and JSP is Java's answer to Active Server Pages or ColdFusion. The following server-side topics are discussed.

About the Authors

Marty Hall is a Senior Computer Scientist in the Research and Technology Development Center at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab, where he specializes in the application of Java and Web technology to customer problems. He also teaches Java and Web programming in the Johns Hopkins part-time graduate program in Computer Science, where he directs the Distributed Computing and Web Technology concentration areas. When he gets a chance, he also teaches industry short courses on servlets, JavaServer Pages, and other Java technology areas. He is the author of Core Servlets and JavaServer Pages and the first edition of Core Web Programming. Marty can be reached at the following address:

Larry Brown is a Senior Network Engineer at the Naval Surface Warfare Center, Carderock Division, where he specializes in developing and deploying network and Web solutions in an enterprise environment. He is also a Computer Science faculty member at the Johns Hopkins University, where he teaches server-side programming, distributed Web programming, and Java user interface development for the part-time graduate program in Computer Science. Larry can be reached at the following address: